Spatial analyses of educational events, processes and practices are becoming increasingly prevalent in education. Examples of these analyses include: studies of the impact of large-scale national school building projects, such as the UK’s ‘Building Schools of the Future’ policy; an EU project to promote children’s participation in architectural design practices; institutional explorations of the layout of staff rooms; understandings of the body and its performatives within particular educational spaces; considerations of the relational materiality of space, people and objects; and interest in the im/materiality of virtual spaces and their import for learning. Such spatial explorations have been important in developing a context for the current symposium and in creating the conditions for a sharper focus on space in educational thinking.

Our aim, then, in this symposium is to take current thinking forward through detailed empirical, theoretical and philosophical analyses of a variety of educational spaces and places in a number of contrasting European contexts. The papers in the symposium make a case for space as far more than an inconspicuous, opaque, physical ‘backdrop’ or ‘container’ to the more important actions produced by human agency. They investigate the embodied experience of space as in dynamic relation to – and intimately entangled with – the thinking, reasoning and learning which is often considered to be the ‘real matter’ of education. In attending to the phenomenology of space, the materiality of spatial practices, and the ontological affordances, pleasures and possibilities of spatial engagements in contemporary education, we find we are able to ask new and different questions about structure and agency, gender, power, participation, appropriation and resistance. Furthermore, by theorizing space through an interdisciplinary lens, and by focusing on the ‘politics’ of space, in all their detailed corporeal, material, ontological, relational, local specificity and intensity, we think we are able to offer better explanatory accounts to address these new questions. These account lead us to ways of thinking differently about how we ‘do space’.

Taken together, the papers in the symposium provide insights into how educational actors (such as students and teachers) co-opt, inhabit and use educational spaces; how educational spaces are enfolded with productive desires, affective flows and intensive becomings as well as disciplinary rules which regulate bodily performatives, movement and expression; and how innovative pedagogic and other practices produce new territorialities and material configurations. In considering these issues, each of the papers address – empirically and theoretically – how and in what ways educational spaces are routinely reconfigured and transformed through the ‘saying, doings and relatings’ of everyday spatial practices. The papers are grounded in a reconceptualisation of space as a heterogeneous multiplicity; as a convergence of the physical, material, discursive, cultural and social; and as the product of inter-relations and interactions. Crucially, they envisage educational spaces as open and always ‘under construction’.